As testing companies come under scrutiny, City can't keep up

After allegations surfaced that Testwell Laboratories was falsifying the results of its concrete strength tests, the New York City Department of Buildings pledged to retest the concrete in some 60 projects in which Testwell was involved. Now, nearly a year after this plan was announced, The New York Times is reporting that the Department of Buildings has only retested a handful of buildings and will have difficulty increasing the pace of its testing.

New York construction accident lawyers monitoring this situation know that with a new indictment against Stallone Testing Laboratories, the Department's backlog has the potential to get much worse.

Retesting the concrete poses several problems for the agency, most of which stem from the inherent complexity of the task. Each building has its own special considerations and there are no universal standards to guide the Department's retesting efforts. Instead, each project requires consultation with the building's engineers to determine which tests and standards are appropriate for each building.

This detailed work is not only time-consuming - it is expensive. According to the Department of Buildings, it costs about $100,000 to reevaluate a building's concrete, a cost the Department has been passing on to the developers or owners.

Not that the Department has performed much work yet. So far the Department has retested only three buildings - the new Yankee Stadium, Goldman Sachs' headquarters and a section of New York-Presbyterian Hospital. The concrete in all three buildings posed no problem.

Not all of the difficulties in retesting concrete are inevitable. The Department of Buildings' antiquated, paper-based record system is partly to blame for the slow pace of retesting. Essentially, there is no easy or quick way to determine which projects Testwell Laboratories - or any other contractor, for that matter - was involved in. Records at the Department have to be inspected by hand, a ridiculous limitation in an age where computerized relational databases are commonplace.

Though the tests have found no problems so far, New York construction accident lawyers are certain that uncertified concrete poses a great risk. If faulty concrete is used in a structure it can affect both the short-term and long-term safety of a project. Maintenance schedules are prepared under the assumption that concrete of a certain strength is in place. If the concrete is weaker than it ought to be, dangerous structural degradations can go unrepaired, leading, in extreme cases, to building collapse.

Though the Department of Buildings' task has several unavoidable difficulties, at the very least it should take steps to update its database. This will make it much easier to monitor the work of wayward contractors, an issue with which the Department has had repeated trouble.

[The New York Times via City Room]